Sunday, 5 December 2010

Dead Man's Ember



Silence here this last month, not for want of things to say - if only! - but due to all sorts of time pressures and deadlines and, ahem, life changes, personal and professional, all of which managed to organize themselves to fall together all at once.

One fun pressure, though, was organising with Liam McIlvanney a symposium down in Dunedin for St Andrews day, on poetic relations between James K Baxter and Robert Burns.

I had such a good time down there, and the symposium was as good an event as I could have imagined it being. Important details first: the day was free and open to the public, thanks to the generosity and democratic ideals of the folk running the Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies. That makes for a tough, well-read and exacting audience, all the more so given Dunedin's historical connections with both figures. It’s also, it seems to me, like free and open publishing online, one of the material pre-requisites enabling the kind of work - and audience - we need in the humanities.



All the speakers were stimulating and left me with plenty of pondering to be getting on with. There was so much research and reflection supporting all the presentations, and they fed into one another in useful ways. I’m grateful to them all for the obvious work they’d put in, and the effort of engagement that went in to the day and the conversations surrounding it. There were writerly reflections; on national bards and poetic form from Ian Wedde (about whom I’ve enthused over earlier); on debt and influence from Jeffrey Paparoa Holman, on Burns and animals from Keri Hulme. We had careful scholarship from critics John Dennison (whose JNZL piece on cross-cultural poetics you should read if you haven’t yet), Paul Millar, Lawrence Jones and Geoff Miles, and historical work from John Stenhouse and Penny Griffith.

Oh, and on Burns: do look up the latest International Journal of Scottish Literature, a special issue on Burns at 250. It’s another free and open venture, in keeping with today’s theme. All the articles are worthwhile; I want to draw your attention in particular to Liam McIlvanney’s editorial, which rehearses a few of the points he made during the symposium, and Jeffrey Skoblow’s two talks on Burns, the first of which is a particularly fine and free-wheeling set of reflections on song and the nation.

Sunday, 31 October 2010

Zen Flesh, Zen Bones



Amidst all the Islamophobia and shrill ‘new atheism’ thrown up by the war on terror, it makes for a striking contrast to consider the reputation of Buddhism in the West. From the Beats to the Beastie Boys, Buddhism’s kept its reputation in the West as the progressive’s choice in faiths, the peaceful and tolerant religion, glossed by Damien Keown in his Very Short Introduction like this:

Buddhism also seems in harmony with the other dominant contemporary Western ideology, namely secular liberalism. Buddhism is undogmatic, even to the extent of instructing its followers not to accept its teachings uncritically, but always to test them in the light of their own experience…Buddhsm is more concerned with the development of understanding than the acceptance of creedal formulas (OUP, 2000)



A nice reminder then, via Jerryson and Jurgensmeyer’s Buddhist Warfare, of the fact that, like all religious traditions, Buddhism’s been shaped by - and has in turn shaped - the history it has developed within. That’s a history of class society, so a history of war.

Here’s Takuan Soho (沢庵 宗彭) from the Rinzai School of Zen, on the philosophical uses of war, and the Buddhist values of violence:

The uplifted sword has no will of its own, it is all of emptiness. It is like a flash of lightning. The man who is about to be struck down is also of emptiness, and so is the one who wields the sword. None of them are possessed of a mind that has any substantiality. As each of them is of emptiness and has no ‘mind’, the striking man is not a man, the sword in his hand is not a sword a sword and the ‘I’ who is about to be struck down is like the splitting of the spring breeze in a flash of lightning.

I’m not knocking the bloke, naturally; he’s had a delicious side dish named after him, and stars in the manga バガボンド, so there’s a legacy there I need to acknowledge.

But historicising’s important, yes? Anyone who’s read their D T Suzuki with any attentiveness shouldn’t be surprised here. Religious discourse and organization are a part of the totality of their social world - from Hong Xiuquan’s Heavenly Kingdom to Korean Christianity in the democracy movement of the 80s to Falung Gong today - and their contradictions and insights are inseperable. We can’t pick and choose what aspects of traditions we want to acknowledge and, more importantly, a pseudo-progressive mystical Orientalism is still an Orientalism.

So watch out for the uplifted sword!

Wednesday, 13 October 2010

Cold Racism versus Memory



It feels so long since those few months when, just a year ago, Hatoyama’s election brought with it the feeling there were new opportunities for Zainichi. Hatoyama made a great play of his appeal to voters as “citizens” and not “members of the nation,” and planned extending some voting rights to some non-citizens (although, of course, DPRK citizens were excluded from all this with the scorn and conceit to which we’re all accustomed). The autumn of 2009 was alive, in the Zainichi activist circles I moved in, with a sense of possibility: whatever the (massive) cynicism of Ozawa and Hatoyama, their commitment to electoral reform was of long standing, and the introduction of these topics into official discourse above opened spaces for contributions from more radical voices below.

Times change, yes? Obama humbled Hatoyama over Okinawa; Ozawa’s had, shall we say, problems; the question of relations with China, and half-heartedness at best amongst big sections of the DPJ itself, have eclipsed Koreans’ democratic rights as the political questions of the day.



Meanwhile, all the crap of ages continues. Jamie has written about the offensive and violent antics of the creeps in 'Zaitokukai' (在日特権を許さない市民の会), all that stalking of school-children and picketing of playgrounds no doubt an expression of innately Japanese dignity and somehow showing 和 at work. It’s important to stress, as Jamie does, that this weirdness isn’t an aberration from standard conservative norms but is, instead, their expression, the end-product of what Ranciere has described as ‘cold racism’:

The racism that we have in today's case is a cold racism, an intellectual construction. It is primarily a creation of the state. We have discussed the relationship between the state of law and the police state. But it is the very nature of the state that it is a police state, an institution that fixes and controls identities, spaces, and movements, an institution in permanent struggle against any surplus over its account of identities, that is to say it also struggles against that excess to the logic of identity that constitutes the action of political subjects.

Jamie’s post draws an important connection between this ‘cold racism’, the passion from above, the antics of the far right, and the crisis of historical memory in Japan, the product of the decades-long project of revisionism and state-sponsored denial.

So much of this struggle seems to be over the status of victimhood, who gets to claim it, and how, hence, among other things, the popularity of Kobayashi Yoshinori’s conservative manga, with their reassuring message that a sorting out of the facts will reveal the (implied) reader to have been among the victims all along.

One, important, way to counter this framing of victimhood as a rightist political mobilizing category is to insist on the historical record and honest accounting. That’s necessary but, I suspect, insufficient: a complementary approach, drawing on those moments when memory has played a central, and transformative, role in Japanese politics, has insisted on contesting the right’s ownership of the category of victim itself. Records of the horrors and the impact of the Pacific War and, sometimes, of the shock of the realization of war guilt and complicity, have been used by artists to create a sense of commonality between ordinary Japanese victims of the war and people in the colonized nations. Against “cold racism” from above – and its noxious by-products – the project of historical memory has held out the chance for the oppressed in Japan to re-imagine their relations to the forces above them.

John Dower’s Embracing Defeat reproduces a waka from a village poetry magazine from 1947:

The crimes of Japanese soldiers
who committed unspeakable atrocities
in Nanking and Manila
must be atoned for.


Another reads

Vividly, the traces
of the Japanese Army’s atrocities are shown.
Suddenly, a sharp gasp.


One of Saeki Jinzaburo’s poem on atrocities in China was censored by the occupying forces for mentioning regret at losing the war:

So full of grief is this day
that it made me forget
the vexation of the day
we lost the war.


The next great moment of historical memory was the 1960s and 70s, spurred by the radicalism of the student movement. It’s the readership of this era’s war works I find the most interesting to think about, with so many settled into middle age and with decades’ of coping and managing of memory behind them. Most well known internationally is Nakazawa’s はだしのゲン (about which now see the autobiography of Barefoot Gen): so often consumed as an account of the bomb and of war’s depravations, the tale is also an insertion into ‘official’ memory of the story of anti-war and leftist families, victims with an awareness of the victimizing occurring across Asia.



Shizuko Go waited thirty years to write レクイエム (Requiem), her account of the bombing and destruction of Yokohama. Its primary purpose, decent and vital, is to serve as another ‘report on experience’:

People walked abruptly out of one another’s lives. A friend who’d waved goodbye on Kawasaki Station platform died the same night in a firebomb attack; a kindly factory hand who’d given the girls a share when the workers had received a ration of frozen mandarins received his draft papers and wasn’t at his bench one morning. As each day began, the exchange of greetings was full of the joy of having met again, while eyes meeting in farewell each evening held the sorrow of knowing this might be the last time (90).



In representing this in the 1970s, though, Go was also intervening in that political moment, stressing the “ugliness” (98) of the truth of Japan’s war record, the “free-for-all” (98) of Nanking, the “vile acts” (99):

That beautiful something to believe in was not to be found. Not in the turmoil of Yokohama Station, nor in the emptiness of the silent factory; there was no consolation, no answer to her prayer. The divine wind that should have saved the nation from peril had failed to blow…all the things she had believed had disappeared without trace and only the elderly teacher’s tears, with her plea for forgiveness, had poured into the hollow of her heart. (100)

In today’s constricted political spaces, and in the face of a concerted, and largely successful, right-wing offensive, honourable if embattled artists continue in the tradition of Nakazawa and Go. The far right use the category of victim as a ploy and as a tool with which to victimize others. We can look to political strategy to combat this victimization. At the same time, thinking about the experience of victimization, and of the challenge of reconstructing and representing difficult historical memory, offers inspiration and example. The shrillness and theatricality of today’s far right point, I think, to the brittleness of the political categories they’re trying to mobilize with and around. There’s more than one way to be a victim, and more than one way to remember or contest a history.

Sources

I’ve taken quotes from Geraldine Harcourt’s translation of Requiem (The Women’s Press, 1985). The poems are from Dower, Embracing Defeat (New Press, 2000), pp 507 – 508.

Sunday, 3 October 2010

You're Writing What You Know



Elif Batuman’s polemic on Creative Writing courses in the last LRB was good fun, especially the sketch she attempts of the ideology at work in the talk around ‘programme fiction.’

I’m not so interested in that seemingly endless debate about whether the programmes are for the good or not (see the sensible responses from several interested parties, and try finding similarities in Carl Shuker and Tusiata Avia the next time someone tells you writing courses produce a homogenized literary voice). The programmes, and the expansion of higher education more generally, are part of new post-war social-institutional formations, like the salon or the coffee shop in centuries past, so – no surprises here, either – historicizing is in order. What’s the general ideology and authorial ideology within this literary mode of production? Batuman’s much too elegant a critic to use terms of that sort, but an aside of hers points in those directions:

Many of the problems in the programme may be viewed as the inevitable outcome of technique take as telos. The raw material hardly seems to matter anymore: for hysterical realism, everything; for minimalism, nothing much. The fetishisation of technique simultaneously assuages and aggravates the anxiety that literature might not be real work. McGurl writes of the programme as a manifestation of ‘the American dream of perfect self-expression.’ Taken as an end in itself, self-expression is surely sensed, even by those who pursue it, as a somehow suspect project, demanding shame and discipline.

This way of talking about talking about literature and literature in higher education – historicizing all that vital chatter and self-publicising as well as the self-consciously ‘critical’ statements – presents an opportunity to consider the relations between schools, book markets and ideologies of writing, a more interesting matter, if nothing more, than forever pondering whether writing can be taught or not (after all, as Robert Crawford’s The Modern Poet demonstrates, there’s been anxiety on these scores since the 1750s).



It’s not just the question of writing, either, but of reading too. Batuman, in an aside after quoting a writer’s description of their material, notes that "literature is best suited for qualitative description, not quantitative accumulation. It isn’t an unhappiness contest, or an unhappiness-entitlement contest.” That the well-to-do have always loved exotic tales of others’ misery is part of the point here, to be sure; another ought to be that diversifying the range of experiences fed into the contemporary novel, perhaps a useful step, leaves only part of the process explored or expanded. The other question is who’s reading, and how. Now, none of that feels so far away from Brecht’s questions, or some of his answers.

Monday, 27 September 2010

Number Two Home




Reading Nobuko Adachi’s recent essay on “Japanese and Nikkei at Home and Abroad” over at Japan Focus prompted me to dig out my copy of Noreen Jones’ Number Two Home: The Story of Japanese Pioneers in Australia.

I found Number Two Home at the second-hand book fair during the Marxism conference in Melbourne last Easter – for $1, no less! - and got caught up in its story during the flight home. Plenty of Victorian and wild, almost Dickensian detail to this history – the first Japanese to visit Australia were acrobats; pearl diving was the main trade the community built around in Western Australia in its early years – and plenty of reminders of the grubbiness of the colonial settler state’s racist history, those petty and mean little details that sustained White Australia.

Jones reproduces documents from stories that range from the tragic (families separated and imprisoned through the war, businesses seized). the frustrating and vexatious (Murakami Yasuichi denied a driver's license to use his car as a taxi in 1912, for reasons which seemed to be all about the council's meanness).

I love local detail like this, and I hope I learn from it. Whatever the fantasies of White Australia, the continent's working class has never been 'racially' homogenous. The only constant, it seems, has been the hypocrisy of its enemies:

The Japanese who traveled or ventured inland tended to work in itinerant occupations, for example as cooks or labourers, whilst those who stayed in the smaller towns either operated or worked in small businesses such as market gardens or laundries. They were often mistakenly thought to be Chinese by the European population. There were indeed also many Chinese in those occupations. For example, at Marble Bar there were both Chinese and Japanese market gardeners. When the Anglo-Australians in the district met around 1893 to discuss the removal of Asians from the settlement, the proposal excluded those employed as gardeners and domestic servants. The white population objected to the Asiatic presence, but did not want to be deprived of their fresh vegetables, cooks, and laundrymen.

Noreen Jones, Number Two Home: the Story of Japanese Pioneers in Australia (Freemantle Arts Centre Press, 2002), p. 37.

Monday, 13 September 2010

Satoshi Kon [1963 - 2010]




I have very clear memories of the first time I saw Satoshi Kon’s work, and of that sense of elation and excitement that comes when you feel like you’ve made a personal discovery and come into contact with an artist who will mean things in your own life for a long time to come. The self-conscious brilliance and exuberant madness of Paprika’s opening sections help secure that memory, as does having seen it at Canberra’s National Film and Sound Archive, a movie theatre which seems to appear out of bush-covered nowhere, thus adding to the dislocation and otherworldliness of it all.

Tributes have pointed out the massive intellectual dexterity of his films, all the off-the-cuff references and quotations and philosophical and literary sophistication. These films are useful ammunition if you ever get stuck in that tedious argument about anime not being a serious form: the way Kon managed to range from David Lynch and Philip K Dick to John Wayne and Ozu puts paid to all that.



His themes and obsessions – with the de-centred subject, with mediated memory, with images, copies, and originals, with anxiety about ‘true’ representation in a digital era – are so obviously our moment’s themes and obsessions that it seems clear to me we’ll be talking about these films for some time yet.



If that critical discussion is to have value, though, there will have to be a clear-sighted acknowledgement of the feelings energizing what I think we have to call Kon’s moral critique. Each of his works – most obviously the series Paranoia Agent and Perfect Blue – has at its core a persistent moralizing stance, a need to document and condemn what is presented as the sickness and degeneracy of modern, media-saturated society. Kon’s films are full of stray details stressing the connection between contemporary representation, technology, and falsity, miscommunication and lies. Think of his use of noise, background buzzes of malicious gossip or lies blending with the ‘buzz’ of technology and representational devices – Paranoia Agent and Paprika both make good use of this – and all those close-ups of pursed or slackly sneering mouths and made-up eyes, signifiers of an im-mediate communication lost, community habits gone sour.



Misogyny is the imaginative energy for this moral critique draws on and works within. I’m introducing the term not to give Kon a posthumous telling-off (although the aestheticisation of sexual violence in Perfect Blue, whatever its wider intentions, is appalling and should produce unease). Rather, it seems to me that the only way to get a useful reckoning of Kon’s aims and achievements is to make his misogyny central to the discussion, not as a lamentable detail incidental to the work but as its motivating and unifying structure of feeling. Women in Kon’s films stand in for the false, deceptive and untrue – think of the way prostitution as a topic and symbol appears in so many of the works, of those coldly sexual flourishes which appear so unexpectedly through Paprika, or of the way female voices and mouths figure so prominently in scenes of panic or chaos. Millennium Actress, Perfect Blue, Paprika and the Harumi Chono sub-plot in Paranoia Agent all revolve around the policing of femininity, the social and political work that goes into the creation of ‘woman’; this is their great interest, but its also the area where the heaviest moralizing work gets done, and where a symptomatic reading can be helpful. (It’s telling also that the least misogynist of Kon’s works – Tokyo Godfathers – is also the slightest). Kon recognized the importance of women for his own creative activity, even if the ideological work being done there remained obscure to him, telling an interviewer:

It's because female characters are easier to write. With a male character I can only see the bad aspects. Because I am a man I know very well what a male character is thinking. Even if he is supposed to be very cool, I can see this bad side of him. That makes it very difficult to create a male character. On the other hand, if you write a female protagonist, because it's the opposite sex and I don't know them the way I know a male, I can project my obsession onto the characters and expand the aspects I want to describe. However, my next film doesn't have one central female protagonist and until I made Perfect Blue I didn't describe female characters that much, especially in manga. Once I did, I found out it was easy to write them.

Susan J Napier is quoted in Kon’s NY Times obituary as placing Kon is a tradition of “humanist” directors and writers. This seems to me the opposite direction to the one criticism needs to be facing. (A comparison could be made with D.H. Lawrence criticism, most of which, until recently at least, if it wanted to rehabilitate Lawrence did so by trying to find a way to assemble a liberalism out of his work, without acknowledging that Lawrence stands or falls alongside his radicalism. Lawrence is at his most interesting and artistically successful when he’s at his most radically reactionary and illiberal. There's nothing to be gained from working our way around all that waywardness. Satoshi Kon feels the same.)



The anti-humanist power of these works is what I keep coming back to, the severity and relentless intelligence with which they take apart our myths of the centred subject, stable identity, coherent personal narratives. That there’s a gendered logic to all this matters. Elaborating how that logic works, and relating that logic to Kon’s wider project, might tell us about more than his own films.

Saturday, 28 August 2010

Shakespeare's Seminal Economics



We must find means by Trade, to vent our superfluities
[Thomas Mun, A Discourse of Trade (1621)]

All sexuality is a matter of economy
[Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus]

For some years now David Bennett has been working on a history of the connections between sexuality and economics, tracing how “the discourses of money and sex became inseparable at a certain historical moment (and quite possibly remain so)” (Bennett 1999: 288). It’s an intriguing project and, going by the rehearsals of the argument presented so far, will make a rewarding book.

The “certain historical moment”, on Bennett’s reading, occurs early in the eighteenth century. It’s from 1700 or so that discourses around masturbation change their tenor and target. But, at a 2007 seminar of Bennett’s on metaphors of “sexual spending,” his discussion started me thinking about a piece of writing from a century earlier, Shakespeare’s fourth sonnet:

Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend
Upon thyself thy beauty’s legacy?
Nature’s bequest gives nothing, but doth lend,
And being frank she lends to those are free.
Then, beauteous niggard, why dost thou abuse
The bounteous largesse given thee to give?
Profitless usurer, why dost thou use
So great a sum of sums yet canst not live?
For having traffic with thyself alone
Thou of thyself thy sweet self dost deceive;
Then how when Nature calls thee to be gone,
What acceptable audit canst thou leave?
Thy unused beauty must be tombed with thee,
Which, used, lives th’executor to be.

Is this image of the young man “spending[ing] upon” himself his “beauty’s legacy” a description of masturbatory ejaculation? As part of the early sequence of sonnets arguing for the young man to reproduce, it’s certainly surrounded by sexual imagery. Booth’s edition of the Sonnets glosses “having traffic with thyself alone” as having a sexual meaning (and echoing earlier sexual content in “all the treasure of thy lusty days” in sonnet two). The Bate and Rasmussen RSC Complete Works (surely the dirtiest-minded Complete Shakespeare to date) glosses “spend” as playing “on the sexual sense of ejaculate” (2436), and Patridge’s Shakespeare’s Bawdy offers a similar definition of spending (his quotation from All’s Well that Ends Well doesn’t bear thinking about, though). Kerrigan’s Penguin Sonnets offers no comment on spending, but does concede, rather snootily, that “some readers find in traffic with thyself a hint of masturbation; but the innuendo can be nothing more” (177).



Reader, I find that hint. What to make of it? I’m not a Renaissance literature specialist but, consulting some reasonably recent works from scholars alive to the resonances of economics and sexuality in early modern England, it’s clear that there is fascinating research being done. Shakespeare’s economic metaphors for sexual activity draw his sonnets into reflections on two of the major intellectual controversies of his time; the status of money and trade in creating value, and the proper place and movement of bodily fluids.

“Hippocrates had argued,” Jonathan Gil Harris summarises in his stimulating book Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare’s England, “that semen, like the froth of the sea, was a foam concocted from blood. Aristotle regarded sperma as refined blood, as did Galen. If Hippocrates and Aristotle saw semen as the end point in a process of sanguineous refinement that led to generation, though, Galen saw the semen as the origin of the male body’s perfection. The loss of semen, therefore, entailed a crippling or effeminization of the male body” (146).

Where later ideologies of gender extol sexual “spending” as evidence of masculine fullness and power, Renaissance figures are much more concerned about the imbalance an ‘excess’ of sexual spending may cause. Like pre-capitalist visions of money, part of the worry is that there just won’t be enough to go around.

There’s a 1597 translation of Aristotle, for instance, maintaining that moderate sexual activity is good:

bicause it doth expell the fume of the seed from the braine…the seed a man retained above a due time, is converted into some infectious humour (The Problems of Artistotle, cited in Smith, 87).

But then Marlowe’s Mortimer will say to Edward that “the idle triumphs, masques, lascivious shows / And prodigal gifts bestowed on Gaveston / Have drawn thy treasure dry and made thee weak” (2:2:156-8). We’re in the presence of a tension.



An added fascination is that much the same debate was going on at the same time about the status of money and trade. Did it create extra value, or were mercantilism and usury responsible for sucking wealth out of the kingdom? Bacon in his essay ‘On Usury’ summarises two arguments against lending at interest that “it is against nature for money to beget money” and that “were it not for this lazy trade usury, money would not lie still, but would in great part be employed in merchandising.” Money itself, and what finance means, is about to undergo a profound change through the English Revolution. That revolutionary process will also, in more complicated and unclear ways, transform how sexuality and the body itself is viewed.

Part of the reason for Shakespeare mixing economic and sexual metaphors, David Hawkes suggests, is that the sonnets are “guided in their reflections on homoerotic love by the conviction that sodomy and usury are homologous violations of natural teleology” (7). Hawkes argues that the sonnets “consistently deploy the imagery and logic of the usury debate in a sustained meditation on the ethical status of homoerotic desire” (97) and positions Shakespeare - the son of a money-lender and no fool himself financially - as a writer feeling the tensions of the shift in the debate on both terms.

In the same way that Bacon ends his essay by suggesting that it is “better to mitigate usury by declaration than to suffer it to rage by connivance”, Shakespeare’s economic metaphors in this sonnet seem to attempt a resolution via imagery of a contradiction that cannot be resolved at the level of ideology: nature’s “free lending” contrasts a profitable sexual ‘spending’ at interest (ie reproductive sexual activity, sperm which impregnates) with the “profitless usurer” whose spending, like Onan’s, spills upon the ground.



There has been plenty of writing produced on Shakespeare and same-sex desire and Shakespeare and economics already, but what I found so exciting about the research of Halpern, Hawkes, Gil Harris, and Smith is the way that these scholars bring both topics into conversation. For all the work on Renaissance sexuality, there’s much less on literature and Renaissance sex; the products of sexual activity, how its mechanics were viewed. These twin anxieties - about the proper place for the male body and its productions and potential productiveness, for the management of desire and about the ‘natural’ status and power of money - come together in curious ways. (Gil Harris cites several examples from early modern economic and dramatic texts where “purse”, “stones” and “jewels” are used as slang terms for scrotum and testicles).

I’ve found an awful lot of value in each of these books, and recommend them. The density of thought and allusion which can be unpacked and pondered over in a single image from one of the sonnets is another example of their power, and an interesting aside for those of us trained to think the Renaissance period in terms of the Marxist account of a social world about to come undone.



WORKS CITED

Richard Halpern, Shakespeare’s Perfumes: Sodomy and Sublimity in the Sonnets, Wilde, Freud, and Lacan. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylania Press, 2002.

Jonathan Gil Harris, Sick Economics: Drama, Mercantilism and Disease in Shakespeare’s England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.

David Hawkes, Idols of the Marketplace: Idolatry and Commodity Fetishism in English Literature 1580 - 1680. NY: Palgrave, 2001.

Bruce R Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England. University of Chicago Press, 1991.

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